WesternDigital WD10TPVT – Advanced Format
These are details from the WD10TPVT, a 2.5” 1TB (12.5mm) SATA drive from Western Digital.
It’s the Advanced Format (4096-byte physical sectors) version of their WD10TEVT disk, though with it’s current firmware you might not know it except for the small warning label on the top sticker of the drive itself.
This label suggests every OS other than Windows XP will work with this drive without any special adjustments, but I’d like to know if this is really true, or if there is a tangible performance impact of using this drive with a default partition layout on other operating systems, notably Linux.
Tejun Heo (of LKML fame) posted a very informative wiki article about the 4kb sector issue here : https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_4_KiB_sector_issues
SMART details :
Device Model: WDC WD10TPVT-00HT5T0 Serial Number: W -DXW151CU0xxxx Firmware Version: 01.01A01 User Capacity: 1,000,204,886,016 bytes
Linux detection :
scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access WDC WD10TPVT-00HT5T0 01.0 PQ: 0 ANSI: 3 sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] 1953525168 512-byte hardware sectors: (1.00 TB/931 GiB) sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Mode Sense: 23 00 10 00 sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, supports DPO and FUA
Oddly, WD seem to have purposefully made the drive advertise itself as having only 512-byte sectors, surely this is going to cause confusion with software trying to correctly identify and partition these 4096-byte sectored Advanced Format disks?
inkhorn.net 
I bought same drive and am glad to hear others also see only 512b sectors announced. I updated util-linux-ng from which fdisk comes, tried parted, tried 2.6.31.14, 2.6.34 kernel with no difference. I just cannot make it report that it has 4kb sector size. I received the disk in an opened package and I wonder whether somebody could have done a low-level reformat. Is that doable?
I installed a jumper on pins 1-2 to enable slow startup of the drive to consume it less power during startup.
You’re absolutely right, even with up to date kernel and userspace tools we’re unable to tell it’s a 4kb physical sector drive. This is because WD have failed to follow the ATA 8 specification: “ATA/ATAPI-8 specifies a way for a drive to export the physical and logical sector sizes and the LBA offset which is aligned to the physical sectors”, this would/should be reported in these files under Linux :
/sys/block/sdX/queue/physical_block_size/sys/block/sdX/queue/logical_block_size
/sys/block/sdX/alignment_offset
WD can and should fix this in a firmware update for these drives.
Answering myself: it seems disk’s BIOS is simply not advertising it is a 4kb drive, you just have to take of alignment yourself.
# fdisk -l -u /dev/sdb
Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
81 heads, 63 sectors/track, 382818 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x96df8562
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 2048 1953525167 976761560 83 Linux
#
Have a look at my earlier post where I discussed this :
http://www.inkhorn.net/2010/06/02/wd-passport-essential-se-1tb-advanced-format/
Though you’ve picked a starting sector of 2048 (the same as Windows 7 uses I believe), you can use any sector divisible by 8.